front cover of The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law
The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law
Andrew Koppelman
University of Chicago Press, 2002
The gay rights question is whether the second-class legal status of gay people should be changed. In this book Andrew Koppelman shows the powerful legal and moral case for gay equality, but argues that courts cannot and should not impose it.

The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law offers an unusually nuanced analysis of the most pressing gay rights issues. Does antigay discrimination violate the Constitution? Is there any sound moral objection to homosexual conduct? Are such objections the moral and constitutional equivalent of racism? Must state laws recognizing same-sex unions be given effect in other states? Should courts take account of popular resistance to gay equality? Koppelman sheds new light on all these questions. Sure to upset purists on either side of the debate, Koppelman's book criticizes the legal arguments advanced both for and against gay rights. Just as important, it places these arguments in broader moral and social contexts, offering original, pragmatic, and workable legal solutions.
[more]

front cover of The Gospel of the Working Class
The Gospel of the Working Class
Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America
Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll
University of Illinois Press, 2011

In this exceptional dual biography and cultural history, Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll trace the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War.

 
Williams and Whitfield preached a working-class gospel rooted in the American creed that hard, productive work entitled people to a decent standard of living. Gellman and Roll detail how the two preachers galvanized thousands of farm and industrial workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also link the activism of the 1930s and 1940s to that of the 1960s and emphasize the central role of the ministers' wives, with whom they established the People's Institute for Applied Religion.
 
This detailed narrative illuminates a cast of characters who became the two couples' closest allies in coordinating a complex network of activists that transcended Jim Crow racial divisions, blurring conventional categories and boundaries to help black and white workers make better lives. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.
[more]

front cover of The Great Migration and the Democratic Party
The Great Migration and the Democratic Party
Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century
Keneshia N. Grant
Temple University Press, 2020

Where Black people live has long been an important determinant of their ability to participate in political processes. The Great Migration significantly changed the way Democratic Party elites interacted with Black communities in northern cities, Detroit, New York, and Chicago. Many white Democratic politicians came to believe the growing pool of Black voters could help them reach their electoral goals—and these politicians often changed their campaign strategies and positions to secure Black support. Furthermore, Black migrants were able to participate in politics because there were fewer barriers to Black political participations outside the South.

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party frames the Great Migration as an important economic and social event that also had serious political consequences. Keneshia Grant created one of the first listings of Black elected officials that classifies them based on their status as participants in the Great Migration. She also describes some of the policy/political concerns of the migrants. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party lays the groundwork for ways of thinking about the contemporary impact of Black migration on American politics.

[more]

front cover of The Greatest and the Grandest Act
The Greatest and the Grandest Act
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 from Reconstruction to Today
Edited by Christian G. Samito
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
In this volume ten expert historians and legal scholars examine the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first federal civil rights statute in American history. The act declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens without regard to race, color, or previous condition of slavery. Designed to give the Thirteenth Amendment practical effect as former slave states enacted laws limiting the rights of African Americans, this measure for the first time defined U.S. citizenship and the rights associated with it.
 
Essays examine the history and legal ramifications of the act and highlight competing impulses within it, including the often-neglected Section 9, which allows the president to use the nation’s military in its enforcement; an investigation of how the Thirteenth Amendment operated to overturn the Dred Scott case; and New England’s role in the passage of the act. The act is analyzed as it operated in several states such as Kentucky, Missouri, and South Carolina during Reconstruction. There is also a consideration of the act and its interpretation by the Supreme Court in its first decades. Other essays include a discussion of the act in terms of contract rights and in the context of the post–World War II civil rights era as well as an analysis of the act’s backward-looking and forward-looking nature.
[more]

front cover of A Guide to America's Sex Laws
A Guide to America's Sex Laws
Richard A. Posner and Katharine B. Silbaugh
University of Chicago Press, 1996
A Guide to America's Sex Laws is the first concise compendium of the nation's sex laws. It summarizes the laws regulating personal sexual activity, revealing gaps, anachronisms, anomalies, inequalities, and irrationalities, and providing an empirical basis for studies of sexual regulation. Judge Richard A. Posner and Katharine B. Silbaugh cover broadly defined areas of regulation, providing background and definitions and placing the laws in their historical and constitutional context. From Alabama to Wyoming, this informative and fascinating reference book will be an essential resource.

"It takes only a few minutes with A Guide to [America's] Sex to realize that the nation's laws governing what two consenting adults can do with one another are an odd jumble."—Eric Fidler, San Diego Commerce

"Especially noteworthy is how laws governing various sexual activities vary from state to state."—Library Journal

"Fascinating and often surprising facts are concisely documented and conveniently organized in A Guide."—Carlin Meyer, New York Law Journal
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter